Networks connecting many computers offer users access to a wide variety of information. Computers are exceptional devices for storing, sorting and relating large amounts of information. Information is stored on computers and networked computing and storage devices as documents or objects, together referred to as document objects. Such document objects may contain any form of information, from text documents and articles, financial data, statistical information, electronic mail, images and photos, music, animation, and even motion pictures.
The Internet, as a network of interconnected networks, offers users access to an even broader collection of information—the Worldwide Web (the “Web”). On the Web, publishers offer information for educational, recreational, commercial and other purposes. The Internet, and it's predominant Web form, is organized and accessed by assigning document objects an address, or Uniform Resource Locater (“URL”). These URLs define the transfer protocol for and location of each individual document object on the Internet, or other network, including the Internetworking Protocol (“IP”) address of the host computer system of the document object.
A URL may also represent an address including instructions for accessing a document object that is generated on request by retrieving and rendering for presentation organized information in response to information supplied by the requestor. When the URL contains enough information to recreate the document object generated in such a manner, that document object can be recreated for others using the URL. A URL may also include information, sometimes called a bookmark, with information allowing the rendering tool to present or highlight a location in the document upon opening the document.
Users accessing computer networks and the Internet are generally required to perform their own searches across the networks for the information, stored as document objects, that they desire or need. As the amount of information available on computer networks, and on the Internet in particular, grows exponentially, existing search and information location techniques become increasingly less effective. Existing Internet search techniques often yield too many seemingly related references which are not, in fact, truly useful to the user. The usefulness of traditional Internet search and indexing systems is actually decreasing as the number of documents on the Internet explodes.
Existing search, categorization, and retrieval techniques for document objects stored on computer networks, while generally executed at the high speeds of modern computer systems, are increasingly imprecise and often much too broad, as well as time and labor intensive, owing to the explosion of information being added to those networks.
A need exists to enhance the network user's information browsing experience. A need exists to provide network users with information relevant to the individual document object they are accessing and provide that information in a context of value to them by relating the document object they are accessing to link references to other document objects within a specific context. Such other document objects may or may not be offered by the publisher of the document object currently accessed. A need exists to provide network users with information relevant to the specific information the user may be searching for and relevant to the user's immediate personal, professional, geographic and other interests.
A need exists to manage information available on the network by creating and defining relationships between document objects that are relevant to one another. A need further exists to allow the creation of multiple frameworks for managing, creating and defining relationships between document objects that are relevant to one another. A need further exists to provide users with access to these multiple frameworks for management of document objects.
A need further exists to facilitate educated selection of related document objects by presenting these relationships with managing information while viewing document objects on the network.
A need exists for entities or groups to be able to communicate information to their employees or members as those employees or members access document objects on a network, and to enable those employees or members to view content deemed important to the entities or groups. A need further exists for publishers of content on the Internet to be able to personalize content presented to Internet users without requiring the establishment of a personal relationship between the user and the content publisher. A need exists to enable the collection of the search experiences of a group of users and share that experience with other users of networked information devices.
These needs reflect a broader need to reduce the time and effort involved, and to provide increased user satisfaction, in user searches for relevant document objects on a network.
Document objects on networks are currently organized based on characteristics of the document objects themselves and organized by the hierarchical structure of the network and the information repositories connected to the network. A need exists to organize and access information on and across networks based on the characteristics of relationships between the document objects. A need exists to provide an extensible framework for managing document objects on a network in a manner that does not modify the document objects, the location of the document objects on the network, or the architecture of the network itself.
A need exists to provide an extensible framework for managing and presenting document objects on networks that allows users to create their own custom management and presentation schemes for document objects, and to identify and use custom management and presentation schemes created by other users that may be of value to them.
Furthermore, a need exists to present a user accessing document objects on the network with a view of a document object the user is accessing, and document objects related to that document object, within a framework for management and presentation developed by the user and by other users of the network.